Does hooliganism need to be tempered?

There’s a saying that you may have heard of before.

‘There’s always one bad egg’.

Whilst for the most part, this is true, it shouldn’t mean that we have to accept it and move on.

When it comes to football fans, the saying remains relevant. Every club will have those that don’t care for crossing the line between friendly rivalry and genuine hate for one another.

We don’t even need to look at seasons gone by to find examples of when this occurs.

Aston Villa and Birmingham City are fierce rivals and this season, they faced off against each other in two West Midlands derbies in the English second division.

Villa claimed bragging rights in both contests, running out 4-2 winners at home in November and 1-0 winners at St. Andrews in March.

But the second match brought about one of the most disgusting acts we have ever seen on a football field.

Aston Villa captain Jack Grealish, with his back turned, was attacked by a Birmingham fan and copped a wild right haymaker that sent him crashing to the floor.

Fortunately, not only was Grealish unharmed by the attack, but he didn’t get up and try to exact revenge on the fan. The incident was quickly brought to a halt when Villa players and ground stewards stepped in and restrained him.

Grealish had the last laugh, scoring the winner and seeing his side home as victors. But it was a dark day for football, showcasing that some idiots that we thought were a thing of the past had slipped through the cracks.

Two more recent instances took place in the Champions League semi finals. After Ajax’s 1-0 win against Tottenham, some Spurs fans were seen throwing punches and beer bottles at Ajax fans in the middle of a London street.

Similarly, a few thousand kilometres west in beautiful Barcelona, some locals were attacked by Liverpool fans who, inexplicably, began dumping them into a nearby fountain.

Perhaps the most disgusting act of hooliganism seen this season was from the Southampton vs Cardiff City fixture earlier this year.

The match took place very soon after the extremely tragic death of Cardiff City signing Emiliano Sala, who died on a plane flight to Cardiff from former club, Nantes in France.

Sala’s death brought the football world together in mourning but for some, it was merely a chance to tear it open again.

In this video, a Southampton fan can be seen making plane gestures to the travelling Cardiff fans, a deplorable act which was met with much criticism online. Southampton have vowed to ban the fans who made these gestures.

Now, there’s no problem with being passionate about your soccer club. There’s also no problem with having fun on an away trip. But it’s these moments when people seem to just want to create problems and when that happens, it’s not good for anyone.

Granted, these hooligans don’t represent their club’s entire fanbase, but they do represent their club. These Liverpool fans can be seen laughing and mocking the local people of Barcelona and whilst they may feel they’ve done nothing wrong, they’re contributing to the image that their club has across the globe.

This isn’t solely aimed at these Liverpool fans either. Other clubs certainly do it and the same thing occurs to them.

Hooliganism can positively contribute to the soccer image across the globe. When done right.

There will always be one, two or maybe more who feel the need to commit such condemnable acts. But if clubs can start taking more serious action against these people, like Southampton did, it will demotivate those thinking of doing something similar.

It will show the club in a more positive light, show that they don’t stand for such acts and in general, it will allow hooliganism to adapt to the now and become, again, a more positive influence on soccer society.

All good things take time. But the more times we see such incidents, the more we wish we could hit the fast forward button into a time when these acts occur less.

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Melbourne should have been apart of Women’s Asia Cup 2026

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Image credit: Shutterstock.com / Dans Destinations

On Wednesday, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) will ratify Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast as hosts of the upcoming Women’s Asia Cup 2026. Games will be played across Stadium Australia and Western Sydney Stadium, the Perth Rectangular Arena, Perth Stadium, and the Gold Coast Stadium.

While the Women’s Asian Cup is a momentous occasion for Australian football, the exclusion of Melbourne stands as a missed opportunity.

Known as the sporting capital of the nation, Melbourne holds an incredibly passionate soccer fanbase and has continually delivered excellence on the pitch.

Zealous and Loyal Fanbase 

Most recently, Melbourne hosted six Women’s World Cup games at the Melbourne Rectangular Stadium, otherwise known as AAMI Park, in 2023 for hungry audiences. Of the six games, five reached over 90% capacity according to AuStadiums, illustrating the desire Melbournians and Victorians have for more football.

Furthermore, Victorians have consistently shown up to support their teams across both the men’s and women’s A-Leagues. According to AuStadiums, in last year’s ALW season, AAMI Park was on average the most attended stadium of the grounds which had hosted 10 or more games, averaging 3,500 people per game. This accomplishment built off of the 22/23 season where AAMI Park had also averaged the largest crowds for stadiums for which had hosted multiple games.

In the men’s competition, AAMI Park has been by far the most played at stadium, with more than 30 games played at the stadium each season since the 21/22 season. Through this, AAMI Park has consistently achieved the highest total attendance of any A-League stadium and has additionally maintained strong crowd averages.

AAMI Park was the third most attended ground on average last year for stadiums which had hosted multiple games. Additionally, AAMI Park also appeared the most in the top 10 attended games of the year, hosting four of the largest crowds of the 23/24 season.

To deny such a passionate fanbase the opportunity to see their national team, and other elite Asian teams, locally, would be a travesty. Compounding it, the decision to neglect one of Australia’s most beloved, professional and modern stadiums on a global stage is another disappointment.

World Class Facilities

In the latest Professional Footballers Australia (PFA) 2023-24 A-League Men Report insights from players, executive teams and coaches, AAMI Park was one of the highest scoring stadiums across Australia and New Zealand.

In terms of pitch quality, measured by the pace, smoothness, hardness and overall quality of the surface, AAMI Park scored above average. Depending on the hosting team, the stadium was rated between 3.5 stars to 4 stars placing it above the 3.2 average across the league.

Additionally, AAMI Park recorded the best atmosphere leaguewide when Melbourne Victory played, achieving a 4.4-star rating. Nearly half a star higher than the second-best atmospheric stadium.

These sentiments were similarly echoed in the most recent PFA A-League Women Report from the 2023-24 season. The report illustrated AAMI Park as one of the premier stadiums in the country, with the ground achieving a 4-star and near perfect 4.9-star rating, across its two hosts.

Australia’s Most Liveable City 

In combination with providing a world class stadium for some of the world’s best teams, hosting games at AAMI Park in Melbourne at the Women’s Asia Cup would have propelled Australia’s image on the global stage by highlighting one of the world’s most liveable cities. Ranked fourth in the world for most liveable cities by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index 2024, Melbourne continues to showcase the very best of Australia.

Travelling fans would get to enjoy the cultural events and sights Melbourne has to offer, while also finding their way to and from games easily due to Melbourne’s simple public transport system.

Furthermore, Melbourne would not only highlight the best of Australia to travellers, but to an ever-increasing global audience. With the rise of interest in women’s football, the amount of people watching and interacting with games has increased exponentially.

According to FIFA, over two billion people engaged with the Women’s World Cup in 2023. Furthermore, the tournament produced over 2.72 billion viewer hours, a 9.2% increase in consumption from the 2019 Women’s World Cup. With so many eyes now on women’s football, it makes sense to put forth Australia’s best.

Conclusion 

Fortunately, as Australia’s most loved team, the Matildas will draw crowds wherever they play, having now sold out 16 home games in a row.

Yet the neglect of Melbourne from the Women’s Asia Cup will prevent one of the country’s most fervent fanbases, which has repeatedly supported the national team and the A-Leagues, from witnessing one of Australia’s most important sporting events.

Unite Round: A-League’s Bold Vision Faces Challenges

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Image credit: Western Sydney Wanderers

The second-ever edition of the Unite Round sparked some interesting debates and narratives about whether the A-League can properly host an inclusive event of this scale.

As the contract with Destination NSW expires, the question remains; Is the experiment worth committing to or should it be scrapped?

A potentially unfair comparison would be to NRL’s Magic Round and AFL’s Gather Round who managed to succeed with the concept in its first two seasons. It’s quite simple, the A-League don’t have the wide-ranging committed supporter base to reach those heights just yet.

But will they do so quick enough for this investment to be worth it?

Challenges that undermine Unite Round

It was a weekend that had a few positives, as mentioned in the A-Leagues press release last week but was certainly marred by a slew of negative and/or embarrassing moments.

Whilst match-going fans, who spent the weekend in Sydney, anecdotally seemed to truly enjoy the experience, there simply weren’t enough that flew out to watch their team play.

The 45,000-capacity Allianz Stadium had a rather empty look for most of the games, mirroring Covid lockdown football, and the lack of atmosphere really took away from the experience that was promised when the concept replaced the controversial Sydney Grand Final deal last season.

For a league that has constantly struggled with attendances since the horror 2021-22 season (which saw attendances slashed in half post-covid), the ability to hold a full-scale weekend of football in one city is realistically never going to work, especially in a cost-of-living crisis.

Another issue that is increasingly being brought up in media and fan spaces is the NSW Police releasing a statement before the weekend had started, ensuring that they were going to crackdown on pre-game marches, flares, banners and flags in an attempt to ‘keep everyone safe’.

Baffling for any hardcore fan, it was a truly tone-deaf action that stripped football of its core: intense and passionate tribalism.

Highlights of the weekend

Focusing on the positives, in the A-League press release, they revealed the numbers behind an improvement on last season’s first-ever United Round.

– 33 goals were scored across 12 games between both the Ninja A-League Women and Isuzu UTE A-League Men.

– Attendance was up 50% on the first-ever Unite Round with a cumulative match attendance of more than 71,000 fans. This was certainly helped by an amazing 30,777 crowd to watch the Sydney Derby.

– Over a thousand fans take part in grassroots clinics, tournament and fan zones.

Commenting on the overall feel of Unite Round 2024/25, Nick Garcia, A-Leagues Commissioner, said:

“It was a turbulent build up with a ticketing outage, a change in venue for our six Ninja A-League Women matches and a planned train strike – but we’re really proud to have welcomed 50% more fans from across Australia and New Zealand to Sydney compared to our first-ever Unite Round,” Garcia said in a press release.

“We really believe in the long term potential of this partnership with the NSW Government and Destination NSW, establishing a new tradition and welcoming football fans from across Australia and New Zealand to electrify this incredible city.

“This event really resonates with our young and diverse fanbase and aligns with our drive to unite communities through a shared love of football. It’s the pinnacle weekend of professional football, and we hope this is a tradition that we can continue to build on and grow in the coming years.

“It’s been a really strong start to our 20th season. Crowds have grown by 30% year-on-year across the first four rounds of the Isuzu UTE A-League Men, while the new Saturday night doubleheader on 10 Bold has also increased the free-to-air national audience by 34%. We look forward to continuing this momentum across both leagues as we move into the summer period.”

The path forward for Unite Round

The words from Nick Garcia suggest that the A-League are committed to making this concept work and are hoping the progress made in the last 10 months can be replicated over time.

The direction in which the United Round goes in is still unknown with the expiration of Destination NSW but it also could lead to an innovation that bursts this weekend into life.

Do they try it in New Zealand for a year? Or up in the Gold Coast where people might have more incentive to enjoy a weekend up in the Sunshine Coast?

The chance for experimentation surely has to be attempted considering the trends suggesting that this weekend won’t be considered an outright ‘success’ in the short term.

Conclusion

In the end, the future of the Unite Round hinges on bold experimentation and a commitment to creating a uniquely football-centric spectacle.

Whether it’s exploring new locations like New Zealand or the Gold Coast, or innovating to better engage fans across the country, the A-League has an opportunity to redefine what a national celebration of football can look like.

The league’s struggles with attendance and atmosphere are real, but so too is the potential for growth in a competition that resonates with Australia’s diverse and passionate football community.

The Unite Round has shown glimmers of promise amid its challenges—now it’s up to the A-League to seize that promise and turn it into a tradition worth rallying behind.

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